Saia waited in line with dozens of other people for the next carriage to arrive. They were larger and longer than the ones she’d seen at the market, connected to the plant creatures that pulled them by thick branches, as if they were part of the same organism. The carriages were the only way to travel from Aressea to the Golden Lands. The only officer one, at least, even if she suspected that Mayvaru’s presence discouraged any alternative.

The monster had left the city, at last. It took a bit for Saia to be certain, since she had to rely on the discordant voices of the market. Unsurprisingly, there hadn’t been a public announcement, but Beramas had started showing up more in public, to show that the security was just as tight as before.

She thought back at the last couple of days, spent touring the villages that surrounded the city. The river had proven to be an even bigger source of inspiration than the sea, with its giant lizards hiding a finger under the surface and the herds of deer, horses and antelopes stopping at its banks to drink. The complicated patterns of their bodies swam freely inside her glass head. She was grateful they all moved on four legs, which simplified her work a bit.

For the moment being, her viserite looked like a series of slate plates piled up inside two long bags of leather that she pretended to carry with great effort. The rest of the block that Ravisu had given her was hanging from her head in the shape of thick tresses piled up on top of each other and falling down to her lower back.

She didn’t think that hairstyle suited the current shape of her body at all. The woman had been a neighbour of the abandoned house that she and Serit had inhabited during their stay at Aressea. Even if she resembled Saia enough, she hated not wearing her own face and living in that body that was shorter, thinner and older, even if her strength was the same. She had transformed into her two days prior, both to get used to the different shape and to work on how natural her movements and expressions looked.

Serit had left on their own the previous day, on another carriage, choosing a late hour that granted less traffic and less light. They had brought the furs with them, along with a big bribe of striped vissins, in case the guards looked too much at their gray face.

All of that in the name of secrecy. They couldn’t rely on Aressea’s crowds anymore to hide themselves, and it was imperative that Mayvaru didn’t know who they were until the moment they met.

The next carriage finally arrived, and Saia waded through the crowd to reach its entrance, taking advantage of the fact that normal people couldn’t push away neither her nor her cargo. The vehicle was pulled by four beasts, the driver sitting behind them on a huge knotty protuberance at the front of the carriage. The whole thing seemed to have been carved out of the trunk of an enormous tree. Saia looked for patterns once again, but didn’t find any. She wondered whether the carvers, one of the governing families, were the ones to create those monstruosities, or it was something imported from outside the city.

There were two officers inside, with the perennially angry expression of someone who had been discarded from the city guard in favor of rich Arissian offsprings. Saia readied her documents, but they didn’t bother checking them. They looked over the small crowd of passengers as they sat down, barking at the ones that took too much space or invaded the central corridor, an area delimited by two lines of red paint that were supposed to infuse into all of them a vague sense of security.

One of the officers was counting under his breath. He stopped at fifty and pushed down the crowd who was still trying to enter. It took a while and the combined effort of both officers to close the doors. The passengers were allowed to open the windows only after the carriage had set into motion. The urgency with which it happened made Saia feel grateful that she wasn’t able to smell anything.

She was too far from the windows to look outside, but she could expand her domain past the wall of wood behind herself to get a glimpse of the lands running beside them. The family sitting to her left was conversing in a language that was different from Arissian. She tried to find some similarities with her own, but it felt just as alien as Shilizé had been, even if in a distinct way. The members of the family could have been Arissians, they were also wearing the same kind of trousers, but their upper garment had been replaced by a shirt in vegetable fiber with short sleeves and a neckline shaped like a dart pointing to the belly. She regretted not thinking about learning at least one of the languages spoken in the Golden Lands, but she’d been too busy practicing her uncertain Arissian. Besides, there’d been no time to look for one of the rare merchants who came back from the cloud cities with crates of story-bottles.

The carriage crossed multiple woods, slowing down only when another vehicle was approaching from the opposite direction. The plant beasts were impassible toward everything around them, they didn’t snap at each other like nervous horses, they didn’t stagger or shake their heads. They were even less entertaining to look at than the endless foliage running by at the sides of the road.

Finally, Saia heard the river. She tensed, along with everyone in the room. She remembered Serit’s explanations: the river divided the Arissian territories around the city from the Golden Lands, and as such was heavily guarded. She got confirmation of their words when the carriage slowed down until it stopped. Now the rushing sound of the river was so loud it felt as if they were sitting right on top of it. The officers on the inside yelled at the passengers to make way as they approached the door. As soon as they unlocked it, it was pushed open by a guard.

“Come down orderly. Ready your documents and cargo,” she yelled to the people inside.

The group beside Saia switched from their language to Arissian. She exited behind them, pretending to drag her two bags with a lot of effort, but not so much that she would slow down the line and get yelled at.

Outside the carriage, the passengers were being divided into various groups depending on how many things they were carrying with them. Saia looked with envy at the fast-moving queue of the ones who had brought only a bag or backpack. She expanded her domain to listen to the interrogations happening in front of her. The guards opened each bag to examine the contents, that much was expected. She knew what not to carry: no weapons, no artefacts or even patterns drawn on paper without an explicit permission signed by a member of the families, no rare materials. Viserite fell under this category, but Saia was confident about her disguise. She readied her documents, a perfect copy of her neighbour’s, except for some details like name and profession. Teormu had helped her and Serit find someone capable of forging documents, even if it required twice the vissins they had paid for the smell pattern. She could only hope it had been worth it.

Most of all, it unnerved her not to know whether Serit had reached Darasa’s ruins unscathed or had been stopped at the border, but the letters travelling in either direction were inspected just as closely as the people.

The slow shuffle forward of the queue stopped when someone was dragged away for having an undocumented statue of glass. It was a delicate thing that looked like a tree without leaves. She wondered whether the sinuous branches of different levels of thickness were tracing a pattern of some sort. The shape was a bit different, with a lack of waves and whirls in favor of ample curves.

Silence fell onto the scene as the tension raised between guards and passengers. Only the voice of the river dared speak out of order. Saia looked at the bridge that they were supposed to cross: it connected one bank to the other, with another outpost of guards waiting on the other side.

Finally, it was her turn. One of the guards opened the first of the bags while a colleague examined her documents. Saia was irritated at the nervousness she was feeling. She could have thrown all of them into the river at the first sign of a problem. Instead, she was forced to answer their questions about her origins and occupation, because even if the guards weren’t dangerous, Beramas certainly was and the city was still too close.

The guards raised the first plate inside the bag to check what was hidden underneath. Their colleague handed back the document to Saia, but her hand remained open in front of her as if she was expecting to receive something else.

“Documents for the cargo,” she said with a bored voice after noticing Saia’s confused look. “It’s mandatory when carrying a huge quantity of material of the same kind.”

Saia didn’t have them, but that wasn’t the worst part: Serit didn’t have them either, and they had crossed with a whole sack of furs. A wave of buzzing viss washed over her statue as she thought of what to do. She expanded her domain to include the whole outpost, looking for traces of their viss or presence.

She found them in a chest full of vissins inside an office that looked like it belonged to some high-level officer. There were no furs, and the small prison at the base of the wooden tower only hosted two people. The smuggler of glass was being pushed in right at that moment.

Serit had bribed the guards. Still, Saia couldn’t relax until she had met them at Darasa. She couldn’t afford to relax now either, with an officer yelling at her to immediately produce the documents or get arrested. She only had a few vissins on her, not particularly valuable, so bribing the guards was out of the question.

She blinked, realizing she’d been staring ahead without a movement for too long.

“Sure, I have them here,” she said, then kneeled next to the second bag.

The guards tensed, weapons suddenly in hand. Saia briefly considered her possibilities. The first one was to grab the bags and run. They’d have tried to stop her, failed, and as a consequence discovered her nature and fake identity, attracting both Beramas and Mayvaru’s attention. Unless she killed everyone looking, something she didn’t want to even entertain.

The second option was allowing them to arrest her, losing her bags for the moment, and breaking out during the night by putting all the guards to sleep and opening the cell. Once awake, they’d be at least confused about whom, exactly, had helped the prisoners escape. But there was the risk they’d bring the bags somewhere else in the meantime, maybe even examined the contents and found them to be viserite, then involved the sculptors and, as a consequence, Beramas.

So that left her with a third option: scaring them all to the point they wouldn’t dare call Mayvaru or Beramas. That would have started rumors, at the very least, but starting rumors was the first step of her plan, once inside the Golden Lands. Might as well begin a bit earlier.

She changed the content of the bag one instant before opening it. Inside there wasn’t slate anymore, but twelve big eggs. Or so they seemed to the guards, Saia could feel it in their confusion. She had drawn inspiration both from sea snakes and chickens, and as a result they were perfectly round, but with small brown dots here and there on the surface. They were as heavy as stones and full of viserite, of course, but the guards didn’t know that.

“These are my documents,” she said, imbuing her voice with arrogance. “Mayvaru’s official request: beasts that belong to her. She wanted to carry them with her into the Golden Lands, but they didn’t hatch in time, so they had to send someone to deliver them.”

That mention of Mayvaru alone was enough to stun most of the guards. Only the one that had asked for her documents seemed able to fight through her shock, enough to ask:

“Do you have a document to prove it?”

“I was told you’d be informed well in advance,” Saia replied. “Have you checked your correspondence, officer?”

Her eyes flared up, but she didn’t dare protest, because if any of what Saia had said was true her whole life and career were on the line. Or so Saia assumed based on her expression.

“I’ll go check with my superiors,” she said.

She started to walk away. Saia needed to stop her: she didn’t have time to lose, not when more carriages could arrive at any moment, more witnesses of her presence there and of her weird cargo.

“Look what you did!” she yelled, and made the eggs crack.

The guards froze. The ones who were taking care of the other groups seemed to notice that the queue behind Saia was becoming a disorganized crowd and approached to yell at them to stand back. In a short time, a clear area was freed around Saia and the four guards in front of her, while the operations continued behind them in a somewhat orderly way.

The cracks on the eggs were becoming wider. Saia even made them tremble, the shells raising a bit as if something was pushing from the inside.

“This is all your fault for slowing me down,” Saia said, pacing in front of the bag as if she didn’t know what to do. “Now they’ve seen the light and are trying to come out. You’ve destroyed my career. But I’ll drag you down with me!”

She was having a blast, even if she knew it was dangerous to prolong the scene. One of the guards started apologizing, while another one closed the bag with a tug, as if that could stop the eggs from hatching. It worked, of course, because Saia couldn’t afford to waste viss. But she kept pacing and threatening, doing everything she could to raise the guards’ nervousness level without manipulating their viss directly.

“Calm down, calm down,” the one who had asked for her documents said. “I’m sure we can arrange something. You said you need to reach Mayvaru before the creatures hatch?”

Saia stopped in her tracks and glared at her.

“Yes, how many times do I have to repeat myself?”

“We can give you one of our vehicles. We use it for emergencies, but I’d say this can be considered one. Just, please: don’t talk about it with lady Mayvaru. I’m sure we’ll find the messenger responsible for this.”

Saia stared at her. If her viss could emit a sound, it would have been a thunderous laugh.

“That will suffice, I think. If it’s quick enough.”

The guard’s face and viss were washed over with relief.

“I guarantee you it is. You and you,” she said, suddenly turning to address her colleagues. “Take the bags and follow me.”

Saia wanted to protest that she could carry them, but it didn’t fit the image of the high-level officer she had built around herself. So she watched the guards struggling under the weight of the disguised viserite while they all headed toward the wooden tower of the outpost.

There were two vehicles behind the structure, tied to the animals through branches. The cabins were considerably smaller even compared to regular carriages. They were only big enough to host two people, apart from the rider that sat in front. He arrived shortly after, blinking as if he’d been just awakened. One guard explained the situation, while another helped Saia enter the vehicle and placed the closed bags under the two seats.

“Do you need an escort? We have some personnel to spare,” the guard said, looking back at her colleagues as if asking for a volunteer.

“If I needed an escort, Mayvaru would have sent someone with me,” Saia said. “I was supposed to be discreet.”

That was enough to make her retreat, while whispering something that sounded like wishes for a good voyage.

Saia relaxed when the carriage started moving, wheels and hooves thundering over the wooden bridge. Soon the river disappeared in the distance, and the woods gave way to open fields. Saia realized she hadn’t told the driver where to go, but he proceeded quickly. The garland carved in the wood above his head, symbol of the city, was a shield against any possible attack. Saia thought he must have known where Mayvaru was, everyone probably knew if her trips were frequent enough. She deactivated her vision to check the map imprinted in her memory: there was a thick forest close to Darasa, even if the road they were currently on curved away from it. She kept her domain expanded to look for trees. If she focused on the link that connected her to Serit, she could feel whether she was moving closer or further away.

At first, the name of the Golden Lands had made her think of a rocky countryside full of quarries for the extraction of shiny metals. The truth couldn’t have been more different: the fields of wheat had taken on a golden tinge in the summer light, covering hills for towerlengths on end in every direction. The road traced the crest of one such hill, allowing her to admire the fields from above. She was surprised by what she saw: the plants didn’t follow the perfect rows that characterized the fields back at the mountain, or even the ones she’d seen around Aressea. They traced spirals and waves, whirls and vortexes. They looked like patterns.

She observed them, wondering what it was all for. There was plenty of space between one branch and the next that could easily fit more plants. The layout seemed inefficient, almost a waste. She was pretty sure it wasn’t even possible to activate those patterns by pushing viss into them.

She didn’t have time to wonder much longer: the carriage was proceeding fast thanks to the enormous strength of the two beastplants that pulled it, each step creaking and rustling like a falling tree. The road descended, snaked between two golden hills, and then started a wide curve despite the empty space. Saia saw trees in the distance, felt the trickle of viss that was leaving her sphere decrease in volume. The ruins were close.

She grabbed the bags, moving with inhuman balance. She considered asking the driver to stop, then making him fall asleep and leave quietly, but it would have revealed where she was directed. Much better to disappear without alerting anyone.

She left the few vissins she had in her pockets under her seat, then opened the door on the forest’s side and jumped down. She let herself roll on top of the road, slowing down her fall with winds but not breaking it completely, because she’d learned at Iriméze that it required too much viss. Her statue cracked and broke in places, but the sound was covered by the noise of the beasts and the stones crunched under the carriage’s wheels. She only stopped once she was surrounded by wheat, and waited until the sound of hooves had completely subsided. The rider didn’t slow down nor seem to notice anything.

She still waited a bit, in case he turned to look, then came out of her hiding spot and set out to repair her statue with the pieces that had detached. Not even a fragment of viserite was left on the road when she finally hung a bag to each shoulder and started running toward the forest. It was a good towerlength away, but she didn’t need to enter or even cross it to get to the ruins. She only ran around the perimeter toward the east, until she saw the top of a collapsed building emerging from behind a small hill.

Darasa hadn’t probably been as big as Aressea, but it was certainly taller. Even if the buildings had crumbled onto each other, their ruins were as high as the lowest palace of the capital. The architecture she could glimpse under the layer of vines and infesting plants was also different, square and decorated with geometric patterns instead of the round and smooth Arissian style.

She admired the ruins for a bit before entering. She chose to step through a half-collapsed arc as if it was a doorway, despite the empty space on either side. It did feel like entering a room or a temple, since everything past that point was shrouded in silence.

She expanded her domain to look for Serit, but felt other lives at the edges of her consciousness and shrunk it back. Of course the ruins were inhabited by plenty of animals, from birds to normal rats. Now that Mayvaru was somewhere inside the Golden Lands, she had to be careful about not betraying herself. So she proceeded in silence, determined to find Serit based on sight alone.

She crossed a yard covered in tall grass, heading toward a road. She saw too late that it was blocked by a pile of broken stones, fallen pieces of a building that was now laying on the ground. A long rod of metal jutted out from the top. She followed it with her eyes until she found the opposite end: a triangular point that opened like the claws of an owl, each planted deep into the rock.

She crossed a hall that had once been the lower floor of a building, but its ceiling was for one half made of foliage and half of open sky. There was another weapon planted in the ground, a dart taller than her that had created deep cracks in the marble pavement. The biggest pieces were missing, probably the work of thieves that had arrived at some point during the centuries and found nothing better to steal.

Beyond the hall there was a square, sectioned into three parts by two buildings that had fallen at the same time, one against the other. The darts at each of their bases were even bigger than the others Saia had seen. The buildings had met in the middle and now waited suspended, the ivy slowly tying them together. Saia followed their perimeter, resisting the urge to yell Serit’s name.

Then a person appeared from a pile of debris behind her. She slowed down but kept walking, amused at how the man was standing without protection, so certain she couldn’t spot him. He was wearing a hat with a triangular brim and holding a weapon made of a piece of wood with the extremities tied by a string, dart aimed at her back.

“Turn around slowly and state your name,” he said.

Saia considered ignoring him. How confused he would be, expecting to scare her and not even obtaining a reaction. But Serit was very close and that man could know where they were, so she stopped and turned as slowly as possible. She even feigned a shocked expression.

“Who are you?” she asked.